Automatic call distributors (ACDs) provide businesses with a system for routing incoming customer calls to an available operator or agent. There may be one ACD to handle a limited region for example, concert ticket sales, or there may be a plurality of ACDs connected together, but separated from each other, for handling a large-volume national business (for example, airline ticket sales). Such systems are known and used in the art and provide businesses with a greater incoming call handling capacity.
There are times, however, when even the large distributed ACD systems become flooded with calls so that incoming calls cannot be handled immediately. In these cases, an incoming call is normally placed "on hold" and queued for the next available agent. A customer may wait on hold for a few seconds to many minutes, listening to silence, music or advertisements until either an agent is available or the customer hangs up in frustration. During the waiting time, network resources are being used and either the customer or the business (in the case of "800" service) is paying for the use of the network resources. Furthermore, if the customer disconnects, the business looses income.
A recently offered service provides an announcement of the approximate waiting time in the queue before an agent becomes available. This service is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,715 which issued to D. Lee on Nov. 29, 1988. The Lee Patent also states that the calling party may leave a number for later call back, but does not clearly specify a system for placing such a call back automatically.
Therefore, a problem in the art is that when ACDs have no available agents, new customer calls are placed on hold in a queue, which results in network resources being used at the expense of the business provider. A further problem in the art is that the customer spends idle time on hold and may disconnect, causing lost revenue to the business.